The History of Second City

If you’re heading to Second City for a night of comedy, take Mimi Fron’s Adventure dedicated to the Gold Coast and Old Town, which visits 20 stops of historical significance in the two neighborhoods.

By Dave Lifton (@daveeatschicago)

In the late 1930s, Viola Spolin began incorporating improvisational games to her drama students at a WPA camp at Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side. Out of these exercises, short plays and revues were created. Spolin often worked with children, believing in their inherent creativity and sense of freedom. In 1948, she moved to Los Angeles and established the Young Actors Company, where she taught her approach.

Arguably her most devoted student was her son, Paul Sills, who, along with David Shepherd and Eugene Troobnick, founded the Playwrights Theatre Club at the University of Chicago in 1952. Sills brought Spolin’s techniques into Playwrights, whose original members included Ed Asner, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Barbara Harris, to build chemistry as they staged original and classic plays.

Three years later, Playwrights morphed into the Compass Players, a comedy revue where some sketches were written out of those games and others were created on-the-spot from suggestions from the audience. The latter was inspired by Shepherd’s love of Italian commedia dell’arte. Joining the Playwrights actors were such future notables as Alan Alda, Linda Lavin, Jerry Stiller, and Anne Meara. But the first breakout stars were Nichols and May, who soon left for New York and built a wildly successful nightclub act and Broadway show around their routines.

A few years later, a second Compass Players troupe was formed in St. Louis. Shepherd left for New York in 1959, and Sills, with fellow Compass Players Howard Alk and Bernie Sahlins, moved from Hyde Park to 1842 N. Wells St. in Old Town. For the new company’s name, Alk went with a 1952 collection of derisive essays about Chicago by A.J. Liebling that had been published in The New Yorker called Second City. It was the embodiment of Chicago humor, taking an insult and embracing it with self-deprecation.

In 1961, members of that first group, including Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris, took their act to Broadway’s Royale Theatre, where From the Second City ran for 87 performances. In his New York Times review, Howard Taubman praised the cast, including Arkin as Noah, and many of the sketches, but also felt not all of it worked. “They perform what they invent,” he concluded. “They are on the rising do-it-yourself wave of show business.”

With Harris on Broadway, Joan Rivers replaced her. She only spent a few months, but she would later say that she was “really born as a comedian” during her tenure. Another arrival that year was Del Close, who joined from Compass in St. Louis. Close was fired from Second City in 1965 due to substance abuse, but was nonetheless one of the most influential figures in improv comedy as a director and instructor. He returned in 1973, and over the next 10 years he would mentor some of the biggest names in American comedy history.

A pair of key moments took place in 1967. The first was the formation of a touring company to bring its most popular sketches around the country. The second was that the building housing the club was sold to make way for a high-rise condominium. Second City relocated two blocks south, to 1616 N. Wells St., and it’s been their home ever since.

Around the time Close returned, Sahlins opened a branch of Second City in Toronto. Before long, the talent developed at the clubs would become stars on both sides of the border. In 1975, Lorne Michaels recruited John Belushi from Chicago and Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner from Toronto to be in the inaugural cast of Saturday Night Live.

A year later, another Chicagoan, Bill Murray, joined. That same year, other Toronto alumni—John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty, and Dave Thomas—created SCTV with Chicagoan Harold Ramis for Canadian television.

In 1985, the Second City Training Center opened to teach up-and-coming comedians in the improv traditions created by Spolin, Sills, and Close. It since has expanded to offer courses in improv, writing, stand-up, acting, music, storytelling, and production for all ages and skill levels in its Chicago, Toronto, and New York locations, plus online.

While Second City’s legacy as a pipeline for talent like Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and numerous SNL cast members over the decades is well documented, some of the names may surprise you. Check out the Alumni page on its website, including Peter Boyle, Valerie Harper, Dan Castellaneta, and future Cheers co-stars Shelley Long and George Wendt. That legacy is why thousands of people every year flock to Second City, to be able to say “I saw them before they were famous.”